


Jack the Super-Nurse!

by notapartytrick



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (as in it's mentioned maybe twice), Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Christmas, Crack, Crack and Angst, Gen, Hospitals, Hurt Peter Parker, I introduce: my boi! jack the nurse!, Medical Examination, POV Original Character, POV Outsider, Peter Parker Gets a Hug, Peter Parker Needs a Break, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker is a Mess, Post-Kidnapping, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Precious Peter Parker, Psychological Trauma, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Trauma, Two!!!, christmas eve eve, millenials, this is like the die hard of christmas fics only it's after the shooty shooty, yes this all sounds like a contradiction but bear with me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28290387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notapartytrick/pseuds/notapartytrick
Summary: Jack can work with this.See, his work isn’t all bad. (He tricks himself this way.) He’s on his feet, blasting his imaginary tunes. He’ll get another two hours of kicks out of this song, if he’s lucky. If he’s really lucky, he’ll finally get let off the hook with this shift, this shift that was supposed to be twelve hours but has already stretched to fifteen, this shift which shows no signs of stopping, this shift which needs to contract right back to twelve hours, please, and let him sleep!And then his thoughts die right on the tip of his brain.Ooh, wow, shit. Well, now Jack can count one reason why he’s glad to be on duty for the moment. That reason is in the shape of a boy--who looks closer to a living corpse--who’s just staggered through the doors.---Jack's ER shift is interrupted by the appearance of a ragged and traumatised Peter Parker.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Original Male Character(s), Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 67
Kudos: 330
Collections: Irondad and Spiderson Secret Santa 2020, Lost and Found Irondad Fics, underated irondad





	Jack the Super-Nurse!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neptuneslight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neptuneslight/gifts).



> hello fam!!!! i haven't posted in three whole months because college has been great but busy!! also my area is in tier 4 which is essentially total lockdown AND we're isolating because my dad has symptoms and is waiting for a test result!!! wild times!!!  
> but anyway enough about me, this weird, wacky and (hopefully) wonderful fic is for neptuneslight (omg omg i can't believe i messed up the names IM SORRY I HOPE YOU LIKE THIS ANYWAY) and i hope it's to your liking mate!! honestly i'm not even sure what happened here,,, happy holidays???  
> enjoy folks :)

5 AM. Lord  _ Almighty. _

“Carrie, how many minutes past 5?”

Jack’s asking her because the prospect of looking at any more numbers than he’s strictly obliged to nauseates him right now.

“Twenty-three past.”

“Only thirty-seven left to go until we’re in a whole new hour of hell.” From the hunched-over-the-staff-room-table position he’s assumed, Jack shoots an exhausted finger gun in the direction he thinks Carrie is in. “Go ER squad. Favourite job ever.”

“Yeah, you’re saying the word, but you’re not actually  _ going.” _

Huh. She makes a point. The thing is,  _ going  _ is the exact opposite of what Jack wants to do. He’d honestly sleep on this staff room table. He’d sleep on a tray of suture instruments. It might feel better than his second-hand mattress.

“Ugh,” he mopes. “I feel fifty.”

Carrie isn’t fifty but she still decides to take offense. “Fifty isn’t old, you’re just a millennial. A sweet summer child who doesn’t know the hell of turning thirty.”

Before she can sweep away to go about doing whatever she does that pays better than Jack’s evidently measly title of  _ ER nurse,  _ Jack calls after her, “Give me a reason to _ go, _ Carrie.”

“If you slack off, you’ll get fired and never pay off your college debt?”

Jack blinks. His vision miraculously clears. “Yup. Let’s go. Bless you, C.”

With Herculean strength, he lifts his ruined spine from the table and makes for the reception.

Carrie gives him a little pat on the head as they part ways, and, honestly, it sort of makes Jack’s day.

Now he’s got to screw his head back on. He shakes himself out as he walks beneath the corridor’s crystalline lights, checks his shoelaces are done, his scrubs aren’t on backwards, all that good stuff. It’s a busy night, or morning, he supposes. There are the usual floundering, hollering hordes of drunk and disorderlies; the elderly folks who scowl at them and the ones who politely ignore them; a few flashes of yellow rails and white sheets and drops of crimson red, whisked promptly to the operating rooms; and, through the not-so-pearly gates of Mount Sinai’s ER department, a steady trickle of people who may or may not have something wrong with them and who, regardless of whether they do or don’t, will have to be dealt with by Jack.

_ Let’s go,  _ Jack reminds himself. He tries repeating it like a mantra, but it’s really not that encouraging. It’s too vague and it just puts a song--two very different songs--into his head. They start to blend and make up this hybrid song that sounds like:

_ Let's go! _

_ Make no excuses now, I'm talking here and now, I'm talking here and now _

_ Let's go! _

_ Your time is running out, I'm talking here and now, I'm talking here and now… _

_ Well, come on, let's go, let's go, let's go, little darlin' _

_ And tell me that you're never leaving _

_ Come on, come on, let's go _

_ Again, again and again... _

Jack can work with this.

See, his work isn’t all bad. (He tricks himself this way.) He’s on his feet, blasting his imaginary tunes. He’ll get another two hours of kicks out of this song, if he’s lucky. If he’s  _ really _ lucky, he’ll finally get let off the hook with this shift, this shift that was supposed to be twelve hours but has already stretched to fifteen, this shift which shows no signs of stopping, this shift which needs to contract right back to twelve hours, please, and let him  _ sleep! _

And then his thoughts die right on the tip of his brain.

Ooh, wow, shit. Well, now Jack can count one reason why he’s glad to be on duty for the moment. That reason is in the shape of a boy--who looks closer to a living corpse--who’s just staggered through the doors.

This definitely looks like a Jack Problem. The department knows to look to him for the most troubling, or troublesome, patients. He prides himself on his people skills. It says that in his resume and it’s the only thing he didn’t lie about. Millennials! 

What Jack didn’t mention in his resume, however, was that he’s a bit of a champ at not freaking out about pretty much anything. Vomit? Cool. Copious amounts of blood? Chill. Copious amounts of blood coming from awkward or indecent places? Totally breezy. This shit happens, and Jack will pretend it didn’t even. His poker face is legendary, renowned throughout the department. He was the only one who’d kept his head on during the incident with poor Janet Ferdinand’s exploding bowels, after all.

Well, some shit has happened to this kid, and that’s for sure. For starters, he’s shaking apart like he’s experiencing his own personal earthquake. Maybe that’s why the entire reception has silenced itself in favour of staring intently at him. Jack notices a distinct lack of shoes and an even more distinct, a piercing, a damning  _ not-lack  _ of lacerations. The boy is littered with them. Bruises, cuts, scabs, an alarming sore rounding his neck--this kid’s got it all. Is he collecting them? 

The clothes he’s got on can’t be his, unless he’s impersonating the stupidly baggy clothes of a B-grade rapper. They’re also drenched in blood. Jack notes all this down mentally, trying not to let too much dread leak into his system, shoots a thumbs-up to Maureen, the bewildered-looking receptionist, then goes about approaching the even-more-bewildered soon-to-be patient.

“Hi,” he begins. A nice strong start. He usually starts with this.  _ Hey _ can sound creepy if he’s sleep-deprived because his voice dips in pitch further and further the longer he stays awake.  _ Hello _ awards him in an instant the demeanour of an aristocratic gentleman.  _ Hiya _ is just, no.

The kid doesn’t flinch but he stops in his tracks. Jack tries to meet his gaze but, alas, it’s lost amid a sudden dropping of unwashed bangs across his forehead. That’s fine. Jack’s not making any assumptions about why his hair might look so grimy. No siree.

_ Child abuse. Kidnapping. Trafficking. _

Jack says again, “Hi,” taking a few steps in the boy’s direction but halting before he can invade his personal space. “I’m Jack. I’m a nurse.”

The kid’s head bobs up and down a few times in a series of jerks. Now Jack’s closer, he can hear some very not-normal breathing sounds coming from him, sounds that are juddery and noisy and  _ way _ too fast. He gets a brief glimpse of brown eyes through locks of his hair, well-like pupils that sear through the very air between them.

Honestly, Jack is surprised the kid isn’t bawling yet. He deals with a lot of bawling. Maybe he likes the bawling. He knows what to do about the bawling.

“Can you tell me your name?” he asks quietly, but he still sees the boy squinting at the words as if he’d used a megaphone.

There’s a pause. There’s most always a pause, or maybe no reply at all, when it’s a trauma victim. In the back of his mind, Jack’s got a scientific explanation for that, but he doesn’t feel the need to call it to mind. The sciencey stuff, that’s not why he’s here. At least, it’s not the most important part. The most important part is helping people out with their stuff.

But the kid manages to get his brain to work before Jack can mediate further. 

“Peter.”

It’s whispered and, Jack can’t lie, it sounds like this kid has had a toilet brush forcibly inserted into his throat. 

God, Jack can’t even joke about these things with trauma patients because maybe they actually  _ happened. _

“Peter. Nice. You got a last name?”

And although the kid is still hyperventilating enough to steal all the good air in the stinky-ass reception room, he cracks a smile--quite literally cracks it, because his mouth is one hot Sahara desert-esque mess--

_ Dehydration _ \-- 

And croaks, “Of course I’ve got a last name.”   


“Got one you’d like to tell me, then?”

“Parker.”

It’s mental note time! One point for each name, because, God, Jack, if you can’t even remember  _ names  _ then you’re setting a pretty damn low bar. Peter Parker. Peter Parker who must, right now, be deeply entrenched in the worst few days of his life.

“Peter Parker.” Jack shoots him a smile of his own.

“Yeah.”

It’s the most sad-sounding  _ yeah _ that has ever graced Jack’s ears. Poor, poor kid.

“Peter Parker, how old are you?”

Peter swallows, and, oh, he’s swaying on his feet too. Just--a cherry on top of a totally whammied patient. 

For a moment, just a little moment, Jack can’t deny that he prays for Peter to say _fifteen_ so Jack can get him whisked away to paediatrics and save himself the heartache of becoming attached to this little doe-eyed, messed-up kid. _Be as young as you look, kid._ _Be twelve if you have to._

But no: “I’m sixteen.”   


“Alright. That means you’re already in the right place. You’re officially an adult around here.”   


Peter sways a little more and mumbles, “Cool.”

Bless his heart. Jack begins to suspect a concussion.

Now it’s time to get the kid the heck out of this reception room.

“Peter, I’d like to get you fixed up a little in an examination room. How does that sound?”

Jack waits the beat of silence out, and his reward is a shaky little thumbs-up from Peter.

“Awesome, awesome stuff. How are you feeling? Would you like a wheelchair?”

A shake of the kid’s head.

“Would it be alright if I helped you along, then?”   


Hesitation, then a smaller shake of his head.

At least the kid tells it like it is.

Jack is getting a whole bunch of red flags from all this, and they’re piling up in the back of his mind like junk mail, but his attention has to be on this kid right now, especially because he’s listing from side to side and heavily favouring his right leg. He’s moving so slow a coked-up snail would definitely have overtaken him, and maybe also a snail on no kinds of drugs at all.

Christ. Fifteen-hour shifts do something to your brain.

All the same, he shoots a look at Maureen as they trail past the reception desk, a look that says  _ a quick call to CPS would be lovely right about now. _ She dives dutifully for the phone. Maureen rocks.

Finally, they’re out of the way of the stares of the general public, and, as if the lack of them cuts all the strings of Peter’s tendons, he stutters to a halt, sinking down against the wall. Uh-oh. Shit.

“Woah,” he can’t help but say aloud. He reaches on instinct for the underside of the kid’s arms and gets a full-body flinch in return for his forgetfulness. “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.”

Peter makes no move to adjust his crumpled position on the floor. On the surface, there’s really not a lot going on on his face but a dazed sort of blankness. Thankfully, Jack’s job involves looking past that. His eyes say it all. He’s haunted. He’s overwhelmed. He’s really, really scared. He’s trying his best not to be. He’s--really young, God.

There are staff members going back and forth along this corridor and some shoot him questioning looks, but Jack shakes his head a little at them. He’s thinking that minimising the amount of fuss around the kid is a good idea. It looks like they’re gonna spend some time sitting on the floor. That’s cool.

Jack crouches down by him, by the blood-and-dirt-stained tangle of teenage limbs that is his patient, maintaining that golden bubble of personal space. “Hey, can you tell me anything about what’s going on right now? Why did you just collapse?”

Low blood sugar, Jack’s thinking. Shock, exhaustion…

“They’re wearing off,” says Peter, staring at his knees as he draws them into himself. Quiet, almost matter-of-fact. Maybe numb.

“What’s wearing off?”   


“Drugs. Uh… tranquilisers, I think.”

Jack’s jaw tightens involuntarily.   


He works to maintain his Soothing Nurse Voice, which he thinks he does pretty well at, considering the circumstances. “How did the tranquilisers get there?” 

“Needle.”   


That’s not the answer Jack was looking for, but it’s sufficiently daunting.

“You didn’t take those drugs yourself, did you?”   


Peter huffs out a humourless laugh, then shakes his head lethargically.

“Do you know how long you’ve been on the tranquilisers?”   


Peter sniffs and mutters, “What’s the date?”

“The 23rd of December. Happy Christmas Eve-Eve.”

“Oh, nice. I escaped in time for Christmas.”

Jack has literally nothing to say about that, so he goes, “Yeah.”

Picking at the seam of his borrowed hoodie like it’s not a garment straight out of Carrie, Peter blinks for a while. “Then it’s gotta be… eleven days. Yeah.”   


“You’ve been drugged for eleven days?”   


“Mm-hmm.”

Not normal! Very much not normal. Kid seems to think it is normal. A whole-ass meal of a red flag! Jack is a little terrified! 

So he sits and is terrified, and Peter Parker sits and beathes unevenly, and they sit. They sit for maybe two minutes. Jack would guess about an hour, but he knows he’s wrong. 

“Think you’re ready to get up again?” he ventures.

The kid’s response is a lurch to his feet. 

Alright, they’re rocking and rolling! They’re heading to a quiet examination room at the end of the corridor. At last, they make it in, and Jack gets Peter to sit on the bed while he sticks his head out of the door and calls for a doctor to cover them. 

Up until the very moment he turns his back, Peter’s been… eerily calm, to be honest. Beneath the surface, Jack could discern the freaking out, but for someone he’s at least eighty percent sure is a dire victim of abuse he was doing incredibly well. So well it was getting spooky. It kind of makes sense, therefore, that Peter’s now boring a wide-eyed hole through the sleeve of his hoodie, and also that he’s rocking unconsciously back and forth on the bed.   


Aw, shit, this is gonna make Jack feel all sad, isn’t it?

His people skills might slap, but the tricky thing about that is they usually come along with a buttload of empathy. Jack knows about things like professional distance but actually practicing them? How unreasonable.

So, yes, he’s definitely feeling a lot of sadness right now. Concern, too, and a good helping of anger. Because, like,  _ what? _ How could anyone  _ do  _ this shit? And inflict it on this three-foot Bambi child, no less?

(Because Jack is six foot four, everyone else, naturally, is three feet tall.)

“Hi again,” Jack says quietly, easing himself down into a chair near the kid. A chair with a cushion, hallelujah! Peter seems to be appreciating his own bed. He’s got his free hand clenched in the covers. He maybe hasn’t seen a bed in eleven godforsaken days, oh God, oh God. 

The thing about Jack's capacity for chill-ness around pretty much anything is that it's all external. Inside, he's freaking out quite a damn lot. This is no exception. He's just good at hiding it, he guesses.

Peter hasn’t stopped rocking, but he says, “Hey.” 

Jack notices the kid hasn’t looked him in the eye once. That’s chill, they’ll get there. For now, the rocking seems to be helping him stay calm, so Jack can work around that.

He decides to take a risk in order to get a little more information. “Is that your blood?”

He points at the sleeve, but Peter gives him an answer without looking. “No.”

“Okay.” This probably isn’t a total emergency, then. Small victories.

But Peter keeps on talking. The words start to spill forth from his mouth until he’s babbling. “It’s not mine. It isn’t, it’s not mine. It’s not, it’s--it’s not my blood.”

“I know,” Jack assents gently.

“It’s not my blood.”

“It’s not.”   


“It didn’t come from me.”   


“Who did it come from?”

The shrug he gets in response is not a shrug that actually means  _ I don’t know;  _ it’s one of those shrugs that somehow manages to communicate  _ I know but if I were to try and tell you I’d definitely start heading for a breakdown so I’m going to not do that. _ Peter’s hand flies to his face. He pinches his eyes aggressively.

“That’s cool.”  _ That’s cool _ is one of Jack’s favourite phrases. It’s versatile, it’s dependable. You'll hear him say it a lot if you ever decide to, like, make friends with him or something. “We don’t have to talk about that right now.”

Peter nods without raising his head or removing his fingers from over his eyes.

“Peter, it looks like you’re feeling pretty anxious. How can I help you out with that?”

“No more drugs,” is the blurted response. Peter darts his gaze up and reaches Jack’s chest before he ducks his head again as if scalded. “Please.”

“There won’t be any if you don’t want them. I just wanna help you calm down.”

Oops. The kid is heading downhill before Jack’s eyes. Jack is well-informed on panic attacks, both professionally and personally, and the poor kid’s got just about every symptom in the book.

“Jack,” he whispers. Patients never manage to remember his name, so Jack is happy about that. He’s not happy with the way the kid says it, though. Like he’s clinging to Jack. Like he doesn’t have anyone else. Like his hopes and dreams are invested in him. 

Jack will have to step into those shoes, because, for the moment, Peter really doesn’t have anyone else.

“I hear you,” he says. “Let me help you out. I figure contact is still a no-go?”

Peter just trembles.

“I think we should try some deep breathing. Okay? Let’s inhale now.”

Peter gulps in the air all at once. There’s a terrible amount of pain written across his face. Jack keeps on a faint smile. He’s mostly forgotten the fact that it’s 5 AM.

“Try and fill your stomach with the air. Nice. And breathe it out.”

He does a few more of these with the kid, who’s surprisingly responsive to it.

“Air is great, right?” he rambles to Peter once the kid’s gotten the hang of it by himself. “Ever walk outdoors and smell the air and it’s just, so good?”   


“Yeah, it is,” Peter says between breaths, and, bless his soul, he’s trying his utmost to interact through a panic attack and Jack doesn’t expect answers to his little remarks but, you know, he still appreciates the effort Peter’s putting into providing them.

“What’s your favourite smell?” he goes on. This conversation seems to be a pretty good distraction.

“Never really thought about it.”

“I’m one of those cliche freshly-cut grass guys.”   


“I, I guess I like that.”   


“Maybe a food smell? Or something in your home?”   


“I like... vanilla.”   


“Oh, for sure.”   


“And old books.”   


“I dig that. Old books are more interesting, right?”

And they calm down, and they calm down, and Peter’s face clears just a little. The vibe of the room gives Jack the impression that they can move on.

So he asks, “Who should I call for you?”

The kid picks a weird time to look Jack in the eye, and it’s now. It’s as if he’s assessing Jack somehow, gaze wild with an unmade decision.

Then, he shrugs.

“You don’t know?”

Another shrug.

“Kid, I have a hunch that you do know. You do know and you aren’t telling me.”

It’s pretty blunt, but he needs the emergency contacts. Yes, they could probably trace them through Peter’s medical record, but getting it straight from the kid is easiest. Plus, if the reason why he won’t reveal them is the reason Jack thinks it is, he can deal with that by getting the truth directly.

Yet another shrug, and, gosh, Jack had faith in the kid, but he’s making it kind of difficult to actually get round to treatment right now.

“Your contacts--they weren’t involved in all this, were they?”

Peter shakes his head ardently. Now they’re getting somewhere. “No. That’s, that’s the opposite of… what happened.”

Jack shoots a quick prayer of gratitude to the box lights in the ceiling. “Okay, that’s good to know. But--why are you scared to tell me their names?" 

“I’m not scared for me.”

“This is a totally safe environment. Literally, it can’t get much safer than this.”   


“I know. I just, I don’t… want them to get hurt too. It’s stupid, my brain is kind of off the rails.”

“You get a free pass to be off the rails right now,” Jack tells him honestly.

Peter laughs a little. Result! a laugh! A laugh from Peter Parker, traumatised patient! Jack figures that’s gotta be worth at least ten mental points.

“May Parker,” he says eventually.

“May Parker. Gotcha. Can you remember her number?”   


“Not… not really.”   


“That’s fine. Remember, off the rails pass. Plus, who even remembers phone numbers anymore? What’s the point?”   


“Right,” Peter agrees, and, although it’s quiet, there’s a little smile with it. “Also… uh, don’t laugh.”   


“I won’t.”   


“Tony Stark.”

Jack’s brain raises a single eyebrow.

“I see why you might have thought I’d laugh.”

“It’s true.”   


“Don’t worry, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. I don’t see any reason why you’d make that up right now.”

Jack pokes his head out of the room again and gets someone to contact the contacts. Now, it’s treatment time. Jack thinks they’re probably both dreading this.

“The first thing I’d like to do is clean up everything that I can see now that needs treating.” He dumps a bunch of stuff on the counter, wiggles on some attractive blue sterile gloves, and wheels his chair slowly towards Peter. “So, realistically, I’m gonna have to touch you.”

“Yeah.”   


“How are you feeling about that? Do you think we could try just going ahead with treatment, or should we take it slow?”   


With a shaky inhale and exhale, Peter says, “I think--take it slow.”   


“Awesome.” Jack holds his hand out, palm up, steady. “Try taking my hand.”

Peter wipes his face on the sleeve of that hoodie and gets some half-dried blood on his cheek. Jack decides the most tactful thing is not to mention it. There’s some hesitation from the kid, but eventually he lets his hand drop into Jack’s with a glance at him that seems to say  _ please let me trust you. _ His hand is bloodied and dirty and cut up, starkly contrasting with Jack’s pristine gloves. It’s a kind of hand that cries out to be held.

Jack doesn’t tighten his grip, he doesn’t curl his fingers, he most certainly doesn’t do anything dickish like swerving his hand out of the way. Now is not the time to be a prankster.

Peter’s eyes drift shut. It’s like he’s just now allowed himself to drop his guard for a moment. It’s just this tiny thing, but it really hits Jack.

“That’s great,” Jack comments. “Think you’re calm enough?”   


“Yeah.”

At the first touch of the gloves against his neck, Peter jolts just a little, but he gets used to it soon after. This is going much better than Jack had predicted, and he’s usually an optimist about these things. In fact, it feels like he’s hardly having to do anything, like the kid’s doing it all by himself. It feels like Peter’s been through the wringer like this before.

“You’ve probably called CPS, haven’t you?” he asks as Jack works, flickering his gaze towards him then away vacantly to the floor. 

Jack cannot stop getting blindsided by the crazy things this kid says.

“I… have,” he manages.

“You know, you don’t need to. I know this totally looks like an abuse case, and, uh--but Mister Stark is coming. He’ll fix everything.”   


“I can’t make exceptions, Peter, even for Iron Man. It’s just the protocol.”   


“But it’s gonna… it’ll mess everything up.”

Jack finds himself fixed with another look, a more pleading look.

Ooh, boy, those puppy eyes are dangerous. Jack’s got a mere decade on Peter, but there’s gotta be something mystic about the power of the baby browns trained on him, because his paternal urges are surging at an embarrassing rate right now.  _ Patient, he’s a patient,  _ he hisses to himself. If he were talking aloud, he’d totally be hissing.  _ Now is not the time for baby fever. _

Maybe he should adopt. Would it put guys off dating him if he was a single parent? 

“I don’t know what to say, kid. Wouldn’t you prefer that we followed the rules every time and made sure every kid was safe?”   


The eyes lower.

“Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.”   


“No need to apologise.”   


“Sorry.”

There’s more than just a Gen-Z attitude to the copious apologies. Jack hasn’t yet gotten to the bottom of it. Well, they’ve got lots of time.

There are more sores on Peter’s wrists; Jack needs to get his sweatshirt off to get at them.

“Would it be easier if I cut it off?”   


“No, I can - I can take it off.”

The moment feels momentous all of a sudden, and not in a good way. He tries not to be silly - he’s a nurse, his job is literally to deal with all this crap - and just swallows away his dread and reaches to help ease the hoodie up and over the kid’s head. In order to do this, Peter has to raise his arms above his head, which draws a wince from him before they’ve even started. 

Though Jack takes painstaking care as he pulls away the hoodie, a stream of pained hisses and whimpers still manage to escape the kid through his gritted teeth. And then they’re both confronted with Peter’s ruined torso and, oh  _ man. _

Passing his 25th hour awake, running on long-digested ramen fumes and a Sprite, aching with exhaustion deep within his bones, Jack has never felt so… sprightly. So lucky, to have a body he  _ chose _ to sacrifice.

The sores on Peter’s neck and wrists are deep, wide, and angry, marks that have built up steadily over what must be eleven days. Jack’s never seen anything like it, not ever. 

ER isn’t like the movies. The vast majority of the patients Jack attends to are in need of a few stitches, maybe an X-ray, some painkillers. Abdominal pain. Sprained wrists. Concussions. Overdoses. The occasional stab or gunshot wound. Not  _ this. _ Not  _ all this. _

He’s seen the patchwork bruising, purple and black and red like a nauseating parody of the sunset, but never so localised, so clearly inflicted with malicious intent. He’s never seen wounds so severe go untreated for long enough that they’ve scabbed crookedly over. He’s most certainly never seen so many blistering, raw electrical burns across a single body before.

And--holy  _ macaroni,  _ there are these two deep, round  _ holes _ just below the kid’s collarbone and they’re still bleeding sluggishly and they look like something out of a nightmare, like a six-foot spider sunk its fangs into him, and at this point, Jack wouldn’t be surprised if that was true. Everything’s crazy.

“What are these?” he asks Peter, rushing to press a gauze pad to it for the meantime.

The kid still shakes from the pain of taking off that hoodie. He hesitates, looking anywhere but at Jack.

Then he quietly says, “You know those spikes on the back of a hammer?” 

The blood in Jack’s veins slides to a halt.

No thanks, no thanks, no thanks! This is  _ not a good day! _ Slay him in a gross and gory manner, please! Why, oh why, did God decide that today was a good day to psych him out with a baby trauma victim?  _ Fucking hammer spikes? What the flying, unicycling, motherfreaking fucking fuck?  _ People don’t  _ exist  _ who think hammers and children go together, right? 

_ Peter should be freaking out about this!  _ And he  _ isn’t even! _ And Jack is--internally--freaking the  _ fuck  _ out! This wasn’t in his training! There’s trauma, and then, apparently, there’s  _ big scary daddy trauma  _ that belongs in a cursed corner of the Internet where shit isn’t even  _ real! _

Jack needs to spill this to his apartment buddies, or something, or--no, Jack doesn’t want to go home and tell his apartment buddies about any of this  _ at all _ because it would  _ ruin their days.  _ Just like it’s probably ruined this poor nice kid’s  _ entire fucking life. _

And, just like that, Jack gets a real strong urge to hit an inanimate object at least eight times.

Smiley face. 

He can’t help but remember the other kid. He never learned her name, but he learned that she was fifteen and so he took her to paediatrics. It had felt like getting rid of her, really. He’d messed up pretty much everything he did for the rest of that shift because his mind was overtaken by thoughts about her. She hadn’t been able to speak. She’d held up fingers to tell him her age and they’d been all crooked. Her nose was broken. Her hair was unwashed. She came in alone, all alone. She was shaking like an earthquake. She could do nothing but shake and cry and shudder while Jack helped her along the corridors. Her crying bounced off the walls and stuck on them every so often so now Jack hears them every time he walks past.

“Someone hit you with a hammer?”

Jack’s losing his tact. Fork. Shirt. Mothertrucker. He’s gotta get back on track.

“Sort of. With the wrong end.”

Jack wants to yell at Peter,  _ why aren’t you freaking out? _

Instead, he inhales and exhales. He looks down at Peter’s fidgeting hands, still blood-soaked, and hands him some baby wipes. He cleans the punctures and sticks a temporary dressing over them until a doctor can assess them for stitches.

He explains what’ll happen next. “Once I’ve cleaned everything up, a doctor’s gonna come in and prescribe some stuff. Some pain medication, and probably some Narcan too, to flush out any of those sedatives that might still be in your system and causing harm. From then on, you’ll mostly be able to rest and wait until your contacts arrive.”   


“Mister Stark will be fast,” Peter says, sounding more as if he’s convincing himself than Jack. “He’ll come.”   


“I’m sure he will.”   


“Uh, will I… have you got any water? Or anything?”

A pang of sympathy goes through Jack. The kid sounds so uncertain when he says it. He’s pretty clearly been deprived of food and water.   


“I’m sorry, kid. There’s a chance that you’ll be sent in for surgery. You can’t eat or drink beforehand, so…”   


Peter’s eyes widen. “I, I won’t need surgery.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you won’t.” Well, Jack can’t tell yet. He’s not magic. He’s smart enough, though, to assume that the kid’s scared of going in for surgery. That’s cool, it’s not a fun thing. “Just in case, though.”

“Can we wait for Mister Stark to come before I have to go?” Peter asks in that same panicked tone.   


“If it can wait, of course.” Jack tries to steer his thoughts away from the subject: “Anything else you want?”   


Peter hesitates, then says, “Earbuds?”

Jack has AirPods--go ahead, bully him; he regrets the decision, actually, because it meant, along with his rent, he considered eating the boxes of his cereal that month--and lends them to the kid, who visibly relaxes the moment they plug up his ears. He just sits there for a good few moments, eyes half-shut and mouth half-open, hunched over on the bed.

It turns out he doesn’t even want to listen to music.

“No Harry Styles?” Jack asks him.

“No, thanks.”   


“You don’t like him?”

“Of course I like him.” The kid manages a smile. “I… quiet is better right now.”

Jack gets on with treating him. It’s slow going because pretty much everything he does is painful for Peter. He leaves a little space for the kid to wind down after every noise of pain. 

Finally, he reaches his proverbial camel’s-back-breaking straw: a two-inch-wide burn mark on his stomach, white and pink and awful.

Jack sits back in his chair. He mimes taking out the earbuds, but Peter notices it and tells him, “I can hear fine with them on.”

“Kid, I’m a nurse, not a psychologist. I’m supposed to treat what I can see and make sure you’re alright. But I can’t--I feel like, without knowing what went on, I can’t do that anymore. There’s no obligation for you to tell anyone anything, I just… I’d like to know a little. I’d like to know how these injuries were inflicted, and I’d like to know how old they are, if you’re okay with that.”

Wow, he actually managed to sound pretty cool and coherent when he said that! Really, he thinks his brain is just messed up and morbidly curious, but it’s nice anyway that he made it sound like it wasn’t.

Peter nods a little and licks his cracked lips and fidgets more with his hands, which are now mostly clean. At least on the surface. It feels like Peter’s the same way, like he’s doing a pretty good impression of a calm person but beneath the surface there’s still a whole lot of trauma.

“These,” he says eventually, indicating his wrists and neck, “came from the cuffs.”   


“Cuffs?”   


“Yeah, they didn’t want me to escape.”   


“They cuffed your neck?”

Shrugging, sniffing a little, Peter says, “It worked pretty well, didn’t it?”

Jack looks at him.

The kid huffs apologetically. “Not funny. Sorry.”   


Oh, what the fuck is going on? It’s like being kidnapped and tortured is this kid’s side job.

“The burns?” Jack prompts him, staying gentle and quiet even though he feels like he might as well drop it.

And, of course, it’s just now that it proves to be a good decision. 

Peter swallows really hard all of a sudden, like the reminder is a gobstopper. He mumbles something.

“Hmm?”   


“Cattle prod.”   


“Cattle prod?”   


“Mm-hmm.” Peter mimes jabbing an instrument into his side, then swipes hastily at his eyes.

All Jack can think to say is, “Okay.”

Peter repeats it like it’s the answer to all his problems, like it’s a life ring and he’s drowning: “Okay.”

“Alright.”   


Now the kid’s shaking his head again and again, rapidly, minutely but fervently. It’s like he gets stuck doing it.

Jack places a hand slowly on his shoulder, between bruises. “Peter?”

“Don’t think I can… talk about it.” 

“That’s cool. That’s totally cool. Let’s stay calm.”

“Uh-huh.” Peter is not calm.

Patients like these, like Peter Parker, tend to ward off a breakdown which proves all the more inevitable the more they fight it. After their first flood of tears, they start to come to terms with what the hell went on. Jack thinks Peter needs that, however painful it might be. 

“Would writing it down help any?”

Peter sucks in a steeling breath, then nods. Victory, but a scary one. Because now Jack has to  _ know stuff. _

He takes Jack's phone from him and types. Jack figures it’s better not to stare him down while he does it, so he cleans up a little. His focus is diverted when a sob pierces the silence of the room.

“Hey. Peter.”   


He’s hunched around his knees, back shaking, probably causing himself a lot of pain, but he holds the phone out in one battered hand all the same. Christ. Jack’s heart is doing a lot of not-nice things. 

What he does to try and ease those not-nice heart things is ask for permission to get up on the bed with Peter, who issues another wordless nod. Settling an arm around the kid, Jack leans around him a little, trying his best to be warm and soothing.

He takes the phone from Peter and reads.

_ they mostly beat me up a lot like a couple times each day and they made fun of me while they did it there wasnt a shower or much food or water they kept me sedated so i couldnt escape they unlocked the cuffs to beat me then put me back in after the cattle prod was to get me locked back up then they started to use it all the time and i didnt even know why they were doing it the hammer was just a few hours ago one of them stabbed it into me but i got the hammer and hit him back thats where the blood came from i really didnt want to but i had to make him stop and _

And it ends there.  _ God. _

“Thank you for telling me that,” he tells Peter. “I know it’s a scary thing to do, but you have to keep letting all this out. It’ll help you.”

Slowly, shakily, Peter reaches for Jack and, still in his hunched-over position, huddles around the torso of his scrubs. He’s small and broken and so, so vulnerable. Jack gently squeezes his shuddering shoulder.

Once he’s waited out the shock and the tears and the kid seems functional again - yeah, yikes, it seems cruel to think of people like that, but there’s a process to this stuff - he gets him a hospital gown, ties the back for him, helps him to ease off his ruined pants, starts to clean yet another battlefield of bruises and wounds. Whatever awful people did this stuff, they didn’t miss anywhere.

“You can lie down for this part if you’d like,” Jack tells him as he swabs grime and pus away from a nasty burn on his shin. 

Peter huffs in amusement -  _ amusement! _ \- and says, “I think that’d be tempting fate. If I lie down, I’ll fall asleep and never get back up.”

Get this - when Jack laughs at the remark, Peter laughs with him! In his imagination, Jack is among the clouds doing something totally silly like playing a lute or skipping. A laughing patient, what a great sight! Peter’s not relaxed, but he’s less tense than the bundle of nerves he’d been when he walked through the ER doors. He’s still got the Airpods in with no music. At last, he seems content to sit in the examination room. Jack feels like a bit of a champion for keeping him this chill. He can tell  _ this  _ to his apartment buddies.

Gosh, he really would like a nice boyfriend to come home and talk to about this. He wants a boyfriend and a baby, goddamnit!

“Yikes,” he can’t help but comment as he palpates Peter’s swollen left ankle and the kid yelps in pain.

“Can’t remember that,” Peter grits. “That doesn’t normally happen.”

Jack raises an eyebrow but doesn’t press. 

“Don’t know how I… must’ve blanked out while I was walking here. I don’t remember that hurting.”

“I’ll get it iced.”

Jack winds an ice pack around the ankle and pretends not to notice the hand the kid brings to his face to hide a sudden stream of tears.   


“Thank you, Jack,” Peter breathes.

“No problem.”

They’re mostly done and waiting for a doctor to give the all clear for some medication when Peter, before slumped in place on the bed, startles to his feet. Jack thinks it’s gotta be some delayed symptom of shock and is about to stand and calm the kid down again.

“Pete.”   


Holy shit, look at that. It’s really Tony Stark. Jack had forgotten about Peter’s words but now the man is there in the flesh and he’s barely even surprised.

He stands in the doorway, jacket hung over his arm, hair almost as grimy-looking as Peter’s, shirt buttons in the wrong holes, eyes filled to the brim with relief. Peter stands before him, afloat, leaning on his good leg, slack and already damp-eyed. Tony Stark drops his jacket without a thought. In a few rapid strides, he’s meeting Peter and ever so tenderly bringing his arms upwards to cradle the kid.

The world, for a short moment, stands still as if in remorse for the sins it’s committed against them.

It never registers as strange in Jack’s mind. It just seems  _ right _ that they join so effortlessly.

Peter sags into Tony’s grip and Tony takes his weight silently. The kid's back begins to shake, although Jack can’t make out any sounds coming from him--until a sob tears out of his throat with all the painful urgency of a lightning strike.

Another sob, then another, and Tony buries his face in Peter’s probably stinky hair and shuts his eyes tight and rocks them gently back and forth. This isn't the Merchant of Death. This is just someone safe for the kid to fall into.

Jack feels a little of the man’s own relief.

“I got you,” murmurs Tony Stark.

“I hit one of them back.”   


“It’s alright.”   


“I hit him real hard and he didn’t get up and I just ran away--”   


“And you got out. That’s all. I’ll handle everything else.”

“Thank you,” Peter says shakily.

“You’re good. You’re safe.”

Suddenly, Jack feels an intimidating gaze on him and, sure enough, Tony Stark has finally registered his presence in the room. He shoots Jack a look over Peter’s shoulder. It’s difficult to read, neither wholly threatening nor thankful but a mix of both. In response, Jack lifts his hands from his lap a little and smiles, trying to say  _ I did what I could. _

He gets a small, sad smile back from the man.

Watching Tony Stark take on the kid’s troubles for the moment, Jack feels that this fifteen-hour shift perhaps wasn’t a curse from the gods after all. Maybe it meant that he could make a difference to another patient who really needed him.

Jack’s job is sort of like being a bridge; he’s the guy that spans the gap between his patients and their loved ones. He cleans and dresses stuff, yes, but what always ends up mattering most is that spot he fills for the people he looks after: the person who knows what’s going on, the person who will listen, the person who will understand, the person who cares. He takes his patients’ worst days of their lives and makes them bearable.

And these moments, when emergency contacts rush through the doors to hold their loved ones, are really something. Jack sees them every day, but they’re no less special to him. They’re shards of the strongest good stuff humanity’s got. He’ll work through a hundred Christmas eve-eves - yes, even Christmas days, Hanukkah too - if it means he gets to support these strong people.

“You’re safe,” Tony murmurs again.

_ I bet Tony Stark knows a lot of hot guys I could schmooze with. _

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! my christmas spirit and sense of worth thrives on comments and kudos *blinks at you appealingly* :)  
> i love you folks! my comments are also open for complaints or worries about the season, which i'm sure many of you will have - not all of us have someone to talk to and i'm happy to be that person if you so wish :) i'll start - my haircut got cancelled and although i will not be protesting about it i'm pretty bummed because i love going to the hairdressers and this was gonna be the first time it got cut after i grew out a buzzcut for 15 months! I wanted it to look cool :(  
> i hope y'all have a nice time this holiday, whether it feels like normal or like christmas or like another weird and wacky facet of this weird and wacky year... maybe this fic will match it in weirdness and wackiness??? i also hope jack the millenial gay fatherly dorky nurse made you smile :)


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